Cassie Contigiani and Laura Davies from Belmont New Hampshire along with 118 other youth leaders from 30 countries around the globe attended a seven day Social Impact Summit in Los Angeles, California in July.

The Generation Unified Social Impact Summit was a leadership training for youth working on projects that promote social inclusion and unification efforts between people with and without intellectual disabilities. The first two days of training were held at the Mattel Corporate Headquarters. Contigiani and Davies learned about how to make a project pitch, team building, fundraising, use of social media, project management, event planning, budgeting, and inspired each other. They were provided a mentor, Zaki, from The Future Project in New York City, and became part of a team, "The Barber Squad". Youth on their team were from Chicago, Australia, India, Indiana, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, and New Hampshire! The team became very close. The girls also attended workshops hosted by DOHA which is an international non-profit organization that uses the power of sports for social good. DOHA has a conference each year. This year they made social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities a major part of their conference. Almost every workshop had professional athletes and speakers that talked about this important area of need. A major highlight was attending opening ceremonies for the World Games, and watching some of the great sporting events.

 

Cassie and Laura were chosen to attend because of the work they did over the past year promoting unified sports. They applied to the Summit as a unified pair and had to complete an application and project proposal, as well as produce a short video that told their story and why they should be selected. Now they are back in New Hampshire where they will begin to implement their project over the course of the year. Their project consists of developing an online Unified Basketball Jamboree Toolkit for other communities to learn from based on the 1st Unified Basketball Jamboree that Cassie organized in Belmont. They are also growing more youth leadership in the community, surveying community members about their interests, planning new activities to bring people together, and raising awareness about the need to include people with disabilities in all aspects of life.

 

Youth at the summit developed a Generation Unified Proclamation which reads: "We are generation unified. We stand together for the dignity and possibility of every member of our community-no exceptions. We are committed to breaking through the walls, visible and invisible, that have defined our world for too long. We will raise our voices in pursuit of an inclusive world where friendship is built, trust is kept, and respect always comes first. We are Generation Unified."

 

Generation Unified is in! Are you? #SOGenUin

The Red Sox Game on Thursday, August 20th at Fenway Park began with a Special Olympics ceremony that included New Hampshire's own Alberta Vayens throwing the first pitch... click here to see a video of Alberta!